Zuckerbergh to Harvard Grads: Make Your New Deal Happen

Mark Zuckerberg finally has his Harvard degree. The Facebook CEO and famous college dropout left the Ivy League university 12 years ago to found the social network, but he returned Thursday to pick up a honorary doctor of laws degree and drop some wisdom on the class of 2017.

Zuckerberg called on his alma mater's newest graduates to tackle major, ambitious "great works" projects that bring together masses of people for the general benefit of society. He noted that many technologies  including some being developed at Facebook  are changing the world and also presenting new challenges.

You're graduating at a time when this is especially important, Zuckerberg said in the speech. "When our parents graduated, a sense of purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in a lot of communities has been declining. A lot people are feeling disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void in their lives.

The Facebook executive said that it's time for this generation to define a "social contract" in the vein of the New Deal or the Great Society. In his remarks, Zuckerberg said that we should explore ideas such as universal basic income  the idea that everyone should receive a base salary  and explore ways to provide health care and childcare in ways that aren't tied to an employer.

He also acknowledged that this won't be cheap. "And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn't free," he said. "People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too."

Zuckerberg, 33, is the youngest person to deliver a Harvard commencement speech, according to Facebook  a fact that he wanted to highlight to the crowd. We walked this yard less than a decade apart, we studied the same ideas and slept through the same lectures, he said. We may have taken different roads to get here  especially if you came all the way from the quad  but today I want to share what I've learned about our generation and the world we're building together.

"Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together. Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon  including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects. These projects didn't just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things." - Zuckerberg at Harvard

Its one way to think of it but not necessarily the best way. Clean electricity, moon shots or in our generation trips to Mars, cures for polio, or I suppose in our generation hopefully cancer and HIV among others, are definitely things we would want to do. But here's the thing, if we could do that with a cheap widget that took very little time to make and needed only one person to activate the widget that would be absolutely fantastic. Conversely, if it requires billions of people to work collectively then maybe that is just something we have to do. Nevertheless, we must never forget that jobs are a cost of our getting things done. The reason this is important is the age old issue of scarcity itself. Make no mistake about it, labor remains a 'scarce' resource. This is why productivity enhancing tools from the wheel to the shovel to the cotton harvester resulted in such enhanced living standards. They all free up labor for one purpose to be used in other purposes to achieve other things that we are desirous of achieving.

Yes it is true the Mark Zuckerberg had a perfect score on the SAT (1600/1600). Jesse Eisenbeg who portrayed Mark Zurckerberg on the 'Social Network' had a score of 1260. So did many successful entrepreneurs ... Bill Gates had a near perfect score too.